“In Benjamin Lee Whorf’s excellent book, Thought and Reality, that I strongly recommend, the Hopi language is analysed in fascinating details. For one thing, Hopi has no tenses as we know them, because the Hopi view of life doesn’t fraction time into units the way we do. Instead of minutes ticking away, picture the minutes…
Category
Philosophy
The ones who know don’t talk and the ones who talk don’t know.
In general, Loquacity (rambling talk) opens the doors of the soul, and the devout warmth of the heart at once escapes. Empty talk does the same, but even more so… Empty talk is the door to criticism and slander, the spreader of false rumors and opinions, the sower of discord and strife. It stifles the…
Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.
Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given…
Mumford & Sons, Descartes & Unchanging Substances part 2
And death is at your doorstep And it will steal your innocence But it will not steal your substance Above is an excerpt from the song Timshel by Mumford and Sons, the folk rock band from the UK which continues to grow exponentially in adoration. Put simply, I find their music to be exceedingly brilliant….
Mumford & Sons, Descartes & Unchanging Substances part 1
And death is at your doorstep And it will steal your innocence But it will not steal your substance Above is an excerpt from the song Timshel by Mumford and Sons, the folk rock band from the UK which continues to grow exponentially in adoration. Put simply, I find their music to be exceedingly brilliant….
Those Times When I Don’t Exist
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When…
Mythology: Shallow Truth? Or Deep Truth?
“The Odyssey, from Greek mythology, is the classic Western saga, so much so that now we use the word “odyssey” to describe all significant human journeys. A religious myth is not something that is not true. Although it may not be true in particular, it is overwhelmingly true in general. Even the ancients knew…
Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Criticism
[Walter Benjamin’s]…idea is that criticism does not stand outside the work of art, but stands alongside, maybe even inside, the work of art, participating in the work in order to further express and tease out what the artist already put there. In this theory of criticism, we don’t need the critic to tell us what…
Richard Kerney & Paul Ricoeur Explain the Metamorphic Potential of Metaphore
Ricoeur’s analysis of imagination’s role of the metaphorical play of language leads him to the ontological paradox of creation-as-discovery. ‘Through the recovery of the capacity of language to create and recreate, we discover reality itself in the process of being created…Language in the making celebrates reality in the making.’ Ricoeur can thus conclude that ‘the…
How to Be Happy(?)
The Tetrapharmakos, or, “The four-part cure,” is the Greek philosopher Epicurus’ remedy for leading the happiest possible life. The “tetrapharmakos” was originally a compound of four drugs (wax, tallow, pitch and resin); the word has been used metaphorically by Epicurus and his disciples to refer to the four remedies for healing the soul. The Four-Part…